Singer-composer-dobro player Abbie Gardner hasn’t slowed down since she and her partners in the Americana trio Red Molly decided to take a little time off from each other a couple of years ago. Gardner has been making the rounds, dobro slung around her neck, with accompanists (including her bass-playing husband Craig Akin) in duo and trio settings, and recently started taking the stage alone, with only her dobro and a National reso-phonic guitar for company.

Gardner will do just that at Club Passim in Cambridge on Nov. 3, featuring songs from her soon-to-be-released album “Wishes on a Neon Sign.”

Gardner, 42, had a feeling she’d make a living in music since she was a kid, first trying out the violin, not getting anywhere with it, and then switching to flute. There was plenty of musical influence from her bluegrass-loving mom, and her jazz pianist-trombonist dad. But she couldn’t get into any music schools, instead leaving her New York home to attend Boston University to get a degree in occupational therapy.

“But I had started singing toward the end of high school,” said Gardner from her home in Jersey City. “At B.U. I joined the Inner Strength Gospel Choir and became musical director for the coed a cappella group the Treblemakers.”

It was during the summer after graduation, still living in folk-centric Boston, that she and some friends started getting together to sing Indigo Girls songs.

“That got me interested in playing guitar,” she said. “And as soon as I picked up the guitar I started writing songs. I also started playing a few gigs there, and remember doing an open mic at Passim.”

Gardner focused in on listening to and playing Bonnie Raitt-style slide guitar, which led to some wear and tear on her wrist.

“I started getting tendonitis,” she said. “I had just quit my job as an occupational therapist to become a folk singer. My doctor said I had to stop playing all together. But I still kept the music going. I started singing jazz with my dad’s band and I joined a rock band as a singer.”

Then the dobro – a six-string resonator guitar that’s played with a bottleneck and fingerpicks, sometimes on your lap, sometime hanging, face up, from a neck strap, and exerts far less pressure on the wrist – came into her life

“I was at the Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival in 2004,” recalled Gardner, “and [dobro master] Jerry Douglas was onstage. I was watching him and thinking, ‘Hmm, slide guitar like that, but it’s a different way to play slide.’ I ordered a dobro that day at the festival. It came to my door later that week, and I ended up bringing it to the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival the following weekend. I had no idea what I was doing. I was faking it. But that’s when Red Molly was formed.

“When I sat down at a campfire there with Carolann [Solebello] and Laurie [MacAllister], jamming on each other’s songs, we fell into this three-part harmony that kind of came naturally,” she added. “We were all in transitional phases: Carolann had just left a band, Laurie was kind of sick of playing solo, and I was just starting to play again after the tendonitis. We came to the festival just for fun, not with any agenda. We weren’t thinking about forming a band that would tour for 11 years.”

But now, with the band making plans for a couple of tours in 2018 (Solobello was replaced by Molly Venter a few years ago), Gardner is continuing her solo career.

“I’ve played Passim often, but this is the first time I’m getting up there with just me and my dobro,” she said with a combination of excitement and just a hint of nervousness. “I love the freedom of playing solo because you can kind of wander around through the song and just follow it. So, every night the music is different. But the challenge for me is the fact that I play the dobro, so I have to look down a lot, and some of the chords are hard to spell out and make them sound full, all by myself, while I’m singing.”

Though she usually follows a set list, soloing also allows her the freedom of doing whatever comes to her mind.

“I’m thinking it’ll be a combination of new material from the record, some stuff I’ve never recorded that I’m trying out, and some old favorites that I’m rearranging for solo dobro,” she said. “And I’ll probably do a few covers.”

Abbie Gardner appears at Club Passim in Cambridge on Nov. 3 at 8 p.m. Her former guitar teacher and mentor Ksenia Mack opens. Tickets: $20. Info: 617-492-7679.Upcoming Concerts and Club Dates: